Lincoln woman's drug case draws crowdfunding effort

By Jessica LemaThe Courier

Friday

Mar 11, 2016 at 7:08 PMMar 11, 2016 at 7:08 PM

July 13, 2015 was a day that Lincolnite Shannon Leininger will never forget.

It was the day that her 21-year-old daughter, Devan, was taken into custody by the Lincoln Police and brought to the Logan County Safety Complex following the non-fatal heroin overdose of an acquaintance.

It was also a day that launched Miller's family into an eight-month legal battle that remains unresolved today, while Devan awaits her fate from a cell in the Logan County Jail.

She is charged with the Class One felony of aggravated battery by unlawful delivery of a controlled substance, as well as two other felonies related to drug possession.

However, according to Leininger, Devan was not in possession of heroin at the time of her arrest and her efforts to save her friend’s life are well documented.

Her mother said that Devan had struggled with addiction for about a year, but that the incident came as a major surprise to the family.

“I knew she was a social girl, she had a lot of friends, you know- she’s 21, so she would go out, but I don’t think we realized just how badly she had fallen in with the wrong people,” Leininger said.

Kathie Kane-Willis, co-founder and director of the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University in Chicago, said this week that Devan’s case and others like it may set a dangerous precedent in central Illinois for two reasons- prosecuting the associates of overdose victims tends to deter others in similar situations from calling 911 and that filing charges of a violent nature against those individuals may prevent them from getting the necessary treatment for their own addictions.

“It sends a strong message [to users], we do know that,” Kane-Willis said Thursday, “and I worry for the people of Logan County and the adjacent areas that people are now going to be afraid to call 911 when someone is overdosing.”

She questioned whether or not the recent arrests of other local residents who were tied to heroin overdoses may have been in violation of the Good Samaritan Law and said that she has seen a similar approach taken in other communities where it failed with disastrous results.

“It breaks my heart to think that the way these cases are being prosecuted may very likely lead to more deaths,” she said frankly.

“I really do understand the frustrations of police departments and communities that have never seen a heroin problem before and they want to send a strong message, but that needs to be a message of health and treatment,” Kane-Willis said.

“We’ve been dealing with [heroin] for a long time in the Chicago area. A lot of people died before these laws were passed to save them. People think, in the beginning, that you can arrest your way out of the problem, but they soon learn, after multiple overdose deaths and a worsening of the problem, that they can’t.”

“This is not the way to deal with a public health crisis.”

Kane-Willis started a crowdfunding page for Devan’s legal fees through the site www.crowddefend.com and helped Miller's family find an attorney that would take the case, which was no easy task.

As of Friday, $683 had been donated by 12 people to aid in the young woman’s defense.

As her supporters explained this week, Devan had been driving on a revoked license in an effort to get the overdosing man to the emergency room when she called 911 and was instructed to pull over and administer CPR.

She stopped the van in the 900 block of 21st Street, in Lincoln (about a mile from Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital), so that she and at least one other friend could attempt to resuscitate the overdosing man while police and EMS crews headed their way.

“She did the right thing. She called 911 and she saved his life,” Leininger said Friday.

Devan was arrested on the charge of driving with a revoked license and was later booked on a drug-induced aggravated battery charge.

A passenger in her vehicle, Benjamin O. Neaville, 29, of Mount Pulaski, was also arrested that day on a charge of unlawful delivery of a controlled substance. The same three felony charges that Devan now faces were later filed against him in Logan County Court as well.

On Nov.3, Neaville entered into a fully negotiated plea agreement that resulted in a sentence of seven years in the Illinois Department of Corrections, with a mandatory supervised release (formerly known as parole) of two years to follow his sentence.

The case of another allegedly involved party, Stephen Nelson, 45, of Lincoln, is still pending in the Logan County Courts.

“Were these people addicted to drugs? Yes, they were,” Kane-Willis said Thursday. “Does that make them violent criminals? No, it doesn’t; it makes them people who need treatment.”

“No one died in this instance. So I wonder, ‘who is the victim of the alleged violence?’” she asked. “That is what the Good Samaritan Law is about- prioritizing life over prosecution.”

“There is a movement, at the state level, to get people out of prison and the people they want out of prison are people like Devan Miller- people suffering from an illness who should not be there in the first place,” she said.

One of the people who donated money to Devan’s legal fees is a central Illinois mother who lost her 16-year-old son, Josh Olt, to an overdose in 2012.

“When I heard this girl actually did the right thing, saved someone’s life and was put in jail anyway, I was so disappointed,” Dr. Tamara Olt said.

Olt, who works as an obstetrician-gynecologist in Peoria, mentioned that her ties to Lincoln and Logan County are extensive, including having been cousins with the late former Mayor Scott Cooper. “I do care about Lincoln and the whole state and country. With what’s going on with heroin, we just have to stand up and do the right thing to save people’s lives,” she said.

“How are we going to tell people, ‘hey, if your friend is overdosing, call 911’ and then go and arrest them?” she asked.

“Everybody wants to attack on the supply side, but we’ve been doing that for 20-30 years with a failed war on drugs and we’re worse off than we ever were. We have to start working from a health perspective to work on the demand side of the problem.”

Olt and her husband, Blake, started the JOLT foundation following Josh’s death in an effort to educate people about the Good Samaritan Law and to distribute the opioid-reversing drug Naloxone to users and their loved ones.

“We have to protect these laws, otherwise more of our children are going to die,” she said flatly.

Logan County State’s Attorney Jonathan Wright said Friday that the aggravated battery charge that Devan faces is based on a statute that allows it to be applied in certain instances.

However, he indicated that his professional-ethical standards prevent him from commenting any further on the matter, as two motions are still pending in Devan’s case. One of those is a motion to dismiss, which will be heard by Judge William Workman on April 20.

As of Thursday, Devan was still in custody at the Logan County Jail on $75,000 bond, with 10 percent due for her release.

Kane-Willis said that stories of addiction, like Devan’s, and the many forms of personal and community aftermath that they bring are becoming more demographically widespread.

“People tend to think that they’re immune, but it could be anyone’s daughter- absolutely anyone’s child,” she said. “We really want to stop people from dying. Overdoses are preventable and reversible. No one needs to die from an overdose.”

On that note, she said that she would be glad to visit Logan County, bring with her free naloxone for first responders through a donation program and bring with her an expert who can teach them how to administer the drug.

“There is a knowledge gap for some communities on what’s going to work and what doesn’t,” Kane-Willis said. “We actually have the solutions now, we just need to use them.”

To learn more about the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy’s efforts to prevent overdoses statewide, including vital information on the Good Samaritan Law, visit www.stopoverdoseIL.org.

The JOLT Foundation website is another central Illinois source for overdose prevention information at www.joltfoundation.org.

*An earlier version of this story misprinted Shannon Leininger's last name as Miller.

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